FAR FUTURE

   Fred Polak's The Image of the Future (1973) identifies two distinct categories of images of the distant future, which he called the "future of prophecy" and the "future of destiny". Prophets, although they refer to the future, are primarily concerned with the present: they issue warnings about the consequences of present actions and demand that other courses of action be adopted. Their images are images of the historical future which will grow out of human action in the present day (NEAR FUTURE). To the second category of images, however, present concerns are usually irrelevant; these are images of the ultimate future, taking the imagination as far as it can reach. Such visions are related to ESCHATOLOGY and often feature the END OF THE WORLD; others depict a world where everything has so changed as to have become virtually incomprehensible, or a world which has attained some ultimate UTOPIAN state of perfection.Scientifically inspired images of the far future could not come into being until the true age of the Earth and therefore the scope of possible change were understood - an understanding first popularized by Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) in Principles of Geology (1830). Even then it was not until the establishment of the theory of EVOLUTION that writers found a conceptual tool which made it possible for them to imagine the kinds of changes which might plausibly take place. W.H. HUDSON's A Crystal Age (1887), which belongs to the utopian school, embraces an evolutionary philosophy of a curiously mystical kind, and such traces of mysticism are retained by very many representations of the far future. Most early images of the far future accepted estimates of the likely age of the Sun based on the tacit, natural but false assumption that its heat was produced by combustion; the far-future Earth is thus represented as a cold, dark and desolate place from which life is slowly disappearing. We find such imagery in H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895), George C. WALLIS's "The Last Days of Earth" (1901) and William Hope HODGSON's The House on the Borderland (1908). Hodgson's The Night Land (1912) is bizarre as well as bleak, offering a phantasmagorical vision of a decaying world inherited by frightful monsters. The optimistic far-future vision which concludes George Bernard SHAW's Back to Methuselah (1921) is predicated on the assumption that mind can and will cast off the confining shackles of matter. More elaborate but no less striking imagery is featured in the concluding section of Guy DENT's Emperor of the If (1926), in which our insane descendants are no longer human in form or ability but remain all too human in psychological terms. S. Fowler WRIGHT's The World Below (incorporating The Amphibians (1924); 1929) is equally ambitious, and contrives to transcend the images of decay and desolation associated with so many other visions. These works were quickly followed by Olaf STAPLEDON's monumental attempt to track the entire evolutionary future of mankind, LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), partly based on a blueprint provided by J.B.S. HALDANE in "The Last Judgment" (1927). Other than millenarian fantasies, which claim that the future of destiny is imminent, very few novels link the two images of the future defined by Polak within a coherent historical narrative; LAST AND FIRST MEN is by far the most outstanding example, although Camille FLAMMARION's Omega (trans 1894) had earlier brought the two into rather awkward juxtaposition.The early sf PULP MAGAZINES featured several far-future visions of the end of the world, but had little to compare with the imagery of the UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES. One notable story that presents the extinction of mankind's remote descendants as one more stage in a continuing process of change is "Seeds of the Dusk" (1938) by Raymond Z. GALLUN, in which a much-changed Earth is "invaded" and "conquered" by spores from another world. Gallun's "When Earth is Old" (1951) has time travellers negotiating with sentient plants to assure the rebirth of the species. The quest for some such rebirth is a common motif in far-future stories, and time travellers from the present frequently contrive to turn the evolutionary tide that is sweeping humanity towards extinction, as in such stories as John W. CAMPBELL Jr's "Twilight" (1934 as by Don A. Stuart). The idea of reigniting a senescent Sun in order to give Earth and mankind a new lease of life is poignantly deployed in Clark Ashton SMITH's "Phoenix" (1954) and extravagantly developed in Gene WOLFE's Book of the New Sun tetralogy (1980-83). Such notions arise from false analogies drawn between the life of an individual and that of a species, alleging that species may "age" and become "senescent". The popularity of such ideas in sf is not surprising, given the influence of similar analogies between individuals and cultures in the work of philosophers of history like Oswald Spengler (1880-1936). Spengler's ideas were a strong influence on James BLISH, whose most memorable accounts of the far future are "Watershed" (1957) and Midsummer Century (1972). Images of an aged world that has returned to its "second childhood" are sometimes as affectionate as rose-tinted images of human retirement; the classic example is John CROWLEY's ENGINE SUMMER (1979).Clark Ashton Smith set the most lushly exotic of all his series in Zothique, the "last continent" - a bizarre and decadent world in which magic flourishes. The stories, all written in the 1930s, were eventually collected in Zothique (coll 1970). Zothique offered Smith more imaginative freedom than his distant-past scenario Hyperborea precisely because it was irredeemably decadent. A similar but less fervent series of fantasies is Jack VANCE's THE DYING EARTH (coll 1950), whose later sequels include The Eyes of the Overworld (fixup 1966), which contains a stronger strain of picaresque comedy. A. MERRITT never used the far future as a setting, but his lavish descriptions of exotic landscapes influenced a number of far-future fantasies; Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE, who wrote a series of Merritt-influenced novels in the 1940s, offered a Merrittesque far future in Earth's Last Citadel (1943; 1964).The classic pulp sf story of the far future is Arthur C. CLARKE's Stapledon-influenced Against the Fall of Night (1948; 1953; rev vt The City and the Stars 1956). Its imagery is stereotyped - a bleak, derelict Earth with cities whose handsome, incurious inhabitants are parasitic upon their machines - but its perspectives widen dramatically to take in the whole cosmos, where mankind may yet seek a further and more glorious destiny. This was to become a central myth of sf, and many images of GALACTIC EMPIRE include nostalgic portraits of stagnant backwater Earth. These are not, of course, images of the future of destiny but rather attempts to perpetuate and magnify the historical image - as is obvious in the many epics which construct galactic history by analogy with Earthly history.Images of far-future Earth became more varied in the sf of the 1950s; notable examples include a number of highly stylized and semi-allegorical vignettes by Fritz LEIBER, including "When the Last Gods Die" (1951) and "The Big Trek" (1957), as well as many fine stories by Brian W. ALDISS, including the later items in The Canopy of Time (coll 1959; rev vt Galaxies Like Grains of Sand), "Old Hundredth" (1960), the stories making up The Long Afternoon of Earth (fixup 1962 US; exp vt Hothouse UK), "A Kind of Artistry" (1962) and "The Worm that Flies" (1968). As with all the stories in this category, these tend towards FANTASY, and some controversy was stirred up by a particularly memorable image in The Long Afternoon of Earth, in which gigantic cobwebs stretch between the Earth and the Moon, whose faces are now perpetually turned to one another. Other innovative uses of far-future settings can be seen in John BRUNNER's elegiac adventure story The 100th Millennium (1959; rev vt Catch a Falling Star 1968), Samuel R. DELANY's exotic romance The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Jack Vance's elegant political allegory THE LAST CASTLE (1966), Michael MOORCOCK's angst-ridden The Twilight Man (1966; vt The Shores of Death) and Crawford KILIAN's exotic romance of maturation Eyas (1982).Michael Moorcock's fondness for far-future settings encouraged him to break new ground in his Dancers at the End of Time trilogy (1972-6) and various other works associated with it. In this series, whose tone ranges from extravagant SATIRE to perverse sentimentality, the ultimate future is inhabited by humans with godlike powers who must perpetually seek diversion from the tedium of their limitless existence. Other writers who have made frequent and significant use of far-future imagery in recent times include Robert SILVERBERG, in such works as the surreal Son of Man (1971) and "This is the Road" (1973), Doris PISERCHIA, in such works as A Billion Days of Earth (1976) and Earth in Twilight (1981), and Michael G. CONEY in The Celestial Steam Locomotive (1983), Gods of the Greataway (1984) and other associated works.There are no anthologies dealing specifically with this theme, and it is worth noting that Harry HARRISON's attempt to compile a companion volume to his near-future anthology The Year 2000 (anth 1970), to be entitled The Year 2,000,000, failed to attract sufficient suitable submissions. The theme does not lend itself readily to conventional plot and character development.

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   See also: DEVOLUTION; ENTROPY; MYTHOLOGY.